


Algebra Tutor

by perdue



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, M/M, abusive father/son relationship, high school au oops, teacher/student relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-11
Updated: 2011-11-11
Packaged: 2017-10-25 22:39:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/275616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perdue/pseuds/perdue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bro is a senior in high school who's heading nowhere fast, right up until he meets the new student teacher. Dad/Bro AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Algebra Tutor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lorien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorien/gifts).



> this is probably the fastest work i've done wow (6000 words in around four days?). i'm really slow okay don't judge me. beta'd by the lovely phrenotobe of tumblr and ao3.

You’re a few weeks into second semester, and the only reason you’re in class today is because an acquaintance told you Angela was hoping to hook up. You walk in after lunch, heading straight to the back row of the algebra class you failed last semester and are probably still failing, and you sit low in your seat, feet resting on top of your desk and arms folded in front of your chest as you impassively watch the room around you fill up with students. Part of you pities all of the kids here – and to you, they are practically kids; algebra is a freshman class, and you’re a senior. But you pity them regardless, because half of them are super studious and don’t seem to realize that school is a major waste of time, and the other half who goof off the entire period are trying way too hard and you would facepalm at their sad attempts at being cool but facepalming would be wandering into the realm of uncool itself, so you resist the urge and watch them from behind your shades.

Generally you don’t go for freshmen since most of them are virgins and you don’t like having to deal with their awkward shit, but as far as you know Angela’s been around a few times and she doesn’t appear to be the type of girl to cling on once she’s had you. You also haven’t fucked anything in more than a month and you’re starting to bore of your left hand.

When she walks in, you catch her eye, but she doesn’t come near you. She merely sends you a little wink and follows her friends to their seats near the front of the class. You watch her ass as she walks away and barely notice when some dude enters the room with the algebra teacher, talking animatedly.

It’s time for class to begin, and Mr. Ladenscheine tries to gain the attention of his students, but the young man standing behind him is appropriating it much more quickly and easily. You give him a quick once-over—probably early twenties, thick black hair pressed down flat, not like it was naturally supposed to be that way but because something had made it so, a bit of a large nose, and nicer clothes than Mr. Ladenscheine ever bothered to wear—but quickly go back to zoning out and staring at the back of Angela’s head.

The next time you snap back into focus, it’s because your name is being called. Mr. Ladenscheine is nowhere to be seen and the new guy is holding a roster in his hands and looking out at the students’ faces expectantly. His expression falters a little when the students begin to snicker, a few of them glancing back at you and grinning. He follows the direction of their amusement to see you treating your desk as a footrest and frowns a little.

“Are you Broderick Strider?” he asks.

“What’s it to you,” you reply, never breaking monotone.

“Well, son, since I’ll be teaching this class for the next four months, I’d say it’s just part of my job to know who my students are.” Your jaw almost drops when the dude dropped “son” on you like it was supposed to be some sort of endearing term, or like the guy was even old enough to be calling anyone “son” in the first place. It doesn’t drop, of course – your mouth, that is. You have too tight a handle on your expression to make a rookie mistake like that. “In any case,” the apparently new student teacher continues, “I can’t help but notice you aren’t carrying a textbook or notebook with you. Perhaps you can borrow some materials from a neighbor for today’s lesson?”

You want to laugh to yourself. This guy is just way too easy to pass up.

“Sure thing, dad,” you respond, tongue-in-cheek expression settling on your face with the same invisible calculation that goes into each of your expressions. Your classmates giggle appropriately, but you don’t notice, because the guy you just made fun of is smiling softly. It irritates you for some reason.

“Faith?” One of the girls sitting in front of you looks up and blushes as she tries to wipe the smile from her face. “Could you lend Broderick a few pieces of paper and a pencil?” She nods and blushes a little more as she hands the materials to you, avoiding your shades like her life depends on it. You glance at the student teacher once more and pointedly don’t fume when he shoots you one last smile before continuing to call roll.

 

 

In the rare case that you show up for algebra, you’re usually the first one out of the door. Usually you have better things to do. Today, you linger in the back of the class, unfazed when Faith glances at her pencil and clearly loses the nerve to ask for it back before rushing out. Today, you watch Angela talk to her friends, studying her perfectly fluid movements, the way her blonde hair curls nicely where her shoulder blades give way to ribs, clothes fashionable and revealing without being inappropriately risqué. Your eyes follow the outline of her curves, hips slender but ass rounded, tits large for a girl her age and supported by a push-up, carefully covered by a loose sweater. You feel short pangs of heat coil in your lower stomach, but you stay still and wait for her to approach you.

She does after another minute, telling her friends she’ll meet them after school, and before you know it she’s standing in front of you. You can barely see her eyes under the heavy and distracting coats of eye shadow, eyeliner, and mascara. “You busy tonight?” she asks simply. Her tongue flicks out over her glossed lips momentarily and her head tilts a little to the side. “Maybe we can study together.”

You nod once and flip out your phone, ready to take down her number, which she recites for you unnecessarily slowly. You text her immediately, and she grins as she looks down at the message that reads “we have some intense studying to do. best not distract me, this is serious business.” She looks into your shades for a moment and winks again before spinning around and heading out of the classroom.

After a moment you make to do the same, but the student teacher, who you notice is still in the room, stops you before you can.

“Broderick? Can I talk to you for a moment?”

You pause and consider. Any other time you would just shrug and walk out the door. But you’re getting laid tonight, and are consequently in a pretty good mood. You stop and face him with a simple, “Sup.” He sets you with this weirdly concerned gaze, and you’re careful to not let the mask slip but all of a sudden you feel really uncomfortable.

“I guess you aren’t doing too well in this class?” He’s very tentative in breaching this subject, but for the record you’ve never had a student teacher bother with you at all, let alone the first day they started teaching. “My opinion probably doesn’t count for much seeing as I’m only here until I finish my teaching requirements, and we don’t really know each other, but at this rate you’re looking at another year or two after this one to make up the credits necessary for graduation. It’s only a small start, but as soon as you’re ready I can tutor you privately in math and hopefully raise your grade in this class to the point that you won’t have to take it again.”

You almost scoff, and bite back with monotone sarcasm instead. “Sure, dad, I bet that’d be great. I can’t think of anything I want more than to be tutored in grade nine fucking algebra.”

He recoils some at your language, but smiles nonetheless. “Alright, alright. Sorry to take your time.” Before you can move away, he makes eye contact (no that’s not possible you’re wearing shades) and adds, “I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.”

No one has ever said that to you before.

You grind out a short, “Whatever,” and abscond without bothering to learn his name. You have no plans to see him tomorrow.

 

 

You don’t see him tomorrow, or the next day. Angela was pretty awesome, and she didn’t even wait to be kicked out before leaving. Regardless, you don’t show up to math class for a couple days to send the clear message that you aren’t interested in her and you probably won’t fuck her again.

When you do return to class, you’re the first in the room, and the student teacher is sitting at his desk going through his email. You don’t say anything to him, but he notes your presence regardless, and when he does you’re struck with a pang of confusion at the way his face lights up.

“Hello, Broderick,” he says happily. “You were missed the past two days. But don’t worry, I compiled the notes that went over the chapter you missed. I also figured you probably wouldn’t have any of the materials you need today, either, so I took the liberty of purchasing a notebook and a box of pre-sharpened pencils. Here!” You find you can’t really move as he’s pushing a pile of papers and pencils into your hand. “If you aren’t busy I would be more than happy to stay after school and work with you on the homework, in case you have any trouble understanding the concepts.”

One eyebrow rises pointedly over your shades. You know exactly how to react to this guy; nonchalant reactions are one of your areas of expertise, after all. What you don’t know is exactly how you feel about being treated like this: like you’re worth anything.

Contrary to only known belief, you aren’t an emotionless asshole. You’re an asshole, sure, and you are certainly emotionally stunted. But not showing your emotions doesn’t mean you don’t feel anything at all, even if your steps outside of numbness are rare and far between.

Perhaps it is because they are usually rare and far between that you feel so uncomfortable now. Your stomach is queasy, and you merely shrug in response before heading to the back row to your usual seat. He doesn’t press you for more, just gives you that soft smile before writing announcements on the whiteboard and greeting other students as they come in.

You hadn’t paid much attention to him the first day you met him. Granted, you were distracted by the prospect of sex later in the day, and the chick you were going to bang was sitting just a few rows ahead of you. But now, you really have nothing better to do than to watch, and watching ends up being a lot more entertaining than you’d bargained for. He’s very animated, and you wonder how someone who’s teaching a subject like algebra can get so into it. There’s something about the way he moves his hands when he’s answering questions, the quick, careful way he scribbles notes down on the board, the way his eyes light up when a student correctly answers a problem, that mesmerizes you a little, and before you realize what’s happening, you’ve been taking notes in the notebook he gave you. What’s worse, you’re pretty sure he’s noticed, and he seems quietly pleased.

You know by now from listening to the kids in your class ask questions that his name is Mr. Egbert, and by the time the bell rings you convince yourself that you’ll forget all about it by tomorrow. He reminds you before you leave that he’ll be there after school if you want help. You give him another shrug before absconding.

After school you find yourself walking out of your way to go to your algebra classroom and you aren’t sure why, because you pass it and head out the nearest door so you can go home.

 

Sometimes you wonder if you did something to deserve this.

You don’t fight back when he hits you, something you learned when you were smaller. By now you know you could take him if you tried, but something holds you back. Maybe you are already convinced that you deserve it.

He always liked it better when you were scared, when you tried to cower away from him. He’s still a lot bigger than you, so you find yourself cowering even when you don’t mean to. He slaps you, you bite your tongue. He punches you hard in the stomach, air explodes from your lungs and you gasp for breath, try to stay standing but keel over anyways. He spits on you, calls you useless. You feel the harsh sting of his boot in your side as he kicks you again and again. You think you might have felt something crack. The ringing in your ears drowns out his cursing.

After a while he grows bored of you, your lack of response. You are emotionless, you are numb. Nothing anyone does will get to you. He walks out, slamming the front door behind him. He will come back hours later, drunk. For now, you can find solace in solitude and hold your aching side. It’s only when you try to move that you realize you’re broken.

 

Persistent knocking on the front door brings you out of your pained dozing. You resolve to leave whoever it is sitting out there, but the knocking doesn’t stop even after ten minutes. The addition of a headache is threatening to overlie your fractured rib. You steel yourself and stand with a meaningful groan.

You open the door and are actually unable to keep your lips from parting. Mr. Egbert is standing on your threshold, and in the split second before he sees you and his face brightens to an alarming extent, his expression is spilling anxiety all over your porch and probably drowning the rat nests beneath it. It dawns on you that you haven’t been to school in the past five days at least, and more slowly that this random student teacher was probably worried about you.

You find you don’t know what to say, but that doesn’t matter because he speaks for you.

“I’m so glad you’re home. Is everything okay, Broderick? None of your friends had heard from you, and I tried calling your father but it always went to voicemail…”

He trails off as he inspects you more closely, noticing the bruise on your cheekbone, the way sweat is pricking on your brow from the mere exertion of standing. You don’t have friends, and he isn’t your father. But you don’t bother correcting him.

“Broderick…”

Before you know what’s happening, he’s inviting himself inside, moving you to the couch and gently forcing you to lie down. When his hands move towards you, you flinch out of habit. He sees it even despite the shades and hesitates a moment before touching your cheek lightly, and then placing fingers on your chin and moving your face a little so that he can better inspect the blemish. Your breathing is shallow and you hate that you can’t control your bodily functions, because now you’re perspiring heavily and the pain elicits a low groan deep in your throat. He makes eye contact briefly (no he doesn’t you’re wearing shades that’s ridiculous) and asks very gently, “Where are you hurting?”

“Broken rib,” you rasp through gritted teeth. He looks into your eyes again (shades, into your shades) and his hand moves to your torso, and you’re on the verge of panicking, distressed whimpers escaping you and making you hate yourself for your lack of control. His left hand is suddenly removing your hat, stroking your hair.

“Shh,” he says quietly. “It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you.” His right hand tenderly lifts your shirt up to your chest, and he bites his lip, brows furrowing at the discoloration on your stomach where the skin was bruised over, at the way your skin is stretched so tightly over your ribs that he can clearly see the one that is fractured. You can see in his face how much he wants to ask how this happened, but something holds him back, maybe because he already knows. Part of you is glad for that. “Are you getting treatment for this?” he asks instead. You give a slight shake of your head.

“Taking ibuprofen,” is your short response. His eyebrows crease a little and he removes his fedora, and you realize vaguely that the hat is what makes his stupid black hair stick down like that. You’d laugh, but you’re in too much pain.

“You need to go to the hospital,” he murmurs, reaching to lift you up, and you want to shrink back but there’s nowhere to go. He can read your body language, however, and he stops. Then he’s stroking your hair again. “Broderick, you don’t need to be afraid of me. I’m here to help you. Everything’s going to be okay.”

You don’t know why he’s doing this for you, but you force yourself to relax and heave a shaky sigh. Finally, you give a slight nod and allow him to help you up. A half hour later and jacked up on morphine, you don’t have the strength to pull away when he holds your hand through the examination.

 

You are homestuck for four weeks while your rib heals. He comes over every day, just the weekdays at first, stopping by briefly so that he can bring not just notes and assignments for algebra, but assignments that he’d taken time during his day to go to each of your teachers and collect. You don’t bother with them at first. You’ve never given a shit about school before, so why start now?

Eventually he starts staying longer, not always with you but in the house somewhere. You think he’s realized what a horrible state everything is in. After the first week, you walk into the kitchen when you know he’s been there, and it is completely clean, pile of dirty dishes washed and put away, floor swept, garbage bin emptied, countertops, stove, and sink all wiped down. You stare at the room for a long time before deciding you’ve lost your appetite and returning to your bed.

The next day, when you venture into the kitchen (nice going, your asshole foster father has made a mess of it again), there is a takeout box in the fridge with a note attached to it reading “Broderick, There never seems to be food here so I got this for you” in Mr. Egbert’s neat scribble. You ignore the constricting feeling in your chest as you place the box in the microwave, holding the note in your hand and wondering vaguely who the fuck even uses cursive anymore.

It isn’t until the day that you hear sounds coming from the kitchen and walk in to find him preparing an actual meal along with a home-baked triple-chocolate cake that the fact that you might owe it to him to start trying crosses your mind.

“What’re you doing?” you ask, although your inflection never changes. He looks up from where he’s dicing vegetables on a cutting board that he must’ve brought from his own kitchen and smiles at you.

“How are you feeling today, Broderick? Your homework’s on the table.”

You slink over to the table to see what the assignments for today are for some reason, as if you had any intention of doing them. You’re surprised when you see a thick, heavy stack of papers sitting next to your own, and glance at it in curiosity to find Mr. Egbert’s name along the top. You flip through it. It’s gotta be more than one hundred pages.

“What’s this?” you find yourself asking. Egbert’s grin is small, and he doesn’t look up from his work.

“My thesis,” he responds, just before releasing a long yawn. You stare at him for a long time, then. The wheels in your head begin to turn, and suddenly something clicks.

He’s in college, and he’s a senior. This whole student teaching gig is the last thing he has to do before graduation. And on top of teaching five classes of high school students every day, he still has a senior thesis to write.

“What are you doing,” you repeat, very careful to keep the intonation monotone, though it comes out much more forceful this time. He pauses, seeming to sense that something in the room has changed. However, he doesn’t stop smiling when he looks into your eyes (…shades, not eyes).

“Making dinner,” he says shortly, as if it is the most obvious thing in the world. You want to flip the table, you want to scream at him that he’s wasting his time with you, that he has more important things to be bothering with. But you don’t. You _can’t_.

You grab the assignments he collected for you off of the table and abscond as quickly as you can with a still-healing rib. If you have to keep looking at him with his stupid blue eyes and dumb smile and ridiculous fedora you’re going to puke.

An hour later when he brings a bowl of red curry into your room, you don’t puke. But he ruffles your hair before leaving, and you definitely feel nauseous.

 

Your rib heals and you return to school, and your teachers are all surprised when you hand some of your missing assignments to them. The looks on their faces might even make it worth it to continue.

It’s weird to see him in a learning environment again. You’d really only had class with him twice before it happened. Seeing him without his fedora, acting all professional is weird to you. He’s the same as always, when it comes down to it, and yet something still seems really different.

He smiles. There are a few smiles he uses often, the one where he’s pleased with something, and the one where he’s excited, or the vacant one that is there because it’s just his normal expression. You notice that your classmates don’t get to see all of his smiles, though. There’s the one he’d shoot you when he’d had a particularly long day, and he was so tired but for some reason he could still find it in himself to feel happy. Or the one he always wore when he’d help you with your physical therapy because you stopped trying to make him leave you alone. Or the smug grin that shot onto his face whenever you fell for one of his stupid pranks (harmless things, like whoopee cushions and sharpie mustaches when you fell asleep). Or that strangely sad smile that graced his lips every day when he said goodbye.

He cares about his students. During the month and a half that you were gone, he’s bonded with a lot of them. The studious ones always give him their closest attention and try to interact with him, and they don’t seem to mind that he’s new to teaching and don’t hold it against him when he messes up. Even the goof-offs in class give him some level of respect, which you know from experience is almost unheard of with student teachers. Everyone in the class seems to have these inside jokes, and they all laugh a lot more than you’ve ever seen in any classroom, let alone a math class. It’s like they’re all a family of sorts, not that you have any experience playing happy family, or really family at all. But you can sense it. And for one dreadful, sinking moment you consider that this is something you’ll never know, that you’re so much of an apathetic asshole that even this classroom-family hybrid is too far beyond your reach. You feel this along with a heavy dose of _why do you even care Strider, a hug won’t pay for dinner_ —until he stops lecture after a nice bout of laughter to explain to you what had been so funny. He’s incredibly poor at explaining it which in itself ends up being awkwardly humorous. You pretend to be disinterested, but you get the feeling that he knows your nonchalance is a mask. Somehow, you feel completely okay with it.

 

“Alright, fine, you can tutor me,” you sigh one day after class, as if he had been accosting you about it. “But if we’re gonna do this, can you at least stop calling me Broderick, it’s fuckin’ weird. Just call me Bro like everyone else.” He gives you one of those smiles—the one he always wore when helping you with your physical therapy. Your stomach does this weird flip and it’s an inner battle to keep your face impassive.

“When do you want to start?”

“After school, I guess.”

He looks you in the eyes (…shades……) as he says, his tone soft with an emotion you don’t understand, “I’ll wait for you.”

 

You find you concentrate better when it’s just the two of you. It could be that you have his exclusive attention, or that you don’t feel you have to keep up a front around him like you do around everybody else.

He helps you work slowly through everything you missed first semester, and never becomes frustrated when you don’t understand a concept, though for the most part this is all a lot easier than you’d assumed. You two stay in the classroom for three hours after school every day that week, not even realizing so much time has passed and always ending with a flustered chuckle and his wavering, “Oh, I completely lost track of time. Wow, it’s late! Do you need a ride home?” Your foster father is never there, so you don’t usually have a reason to turn him down.

After the first week, when he pulls up to the curb in front of your house, he stops you before you can get out of the car. “Um, Bro?” He stumbles over your nickname, like he does every time he addresses you now. You don’t know why he has such a hard time avoiding your ridiculous full name. You find it kind of funny, though. “This week is pretty busy for me… Would you be alright with coming to my apartment to work on your assignments instead of staying at school? It would really help me out…”

He seems embarrassed. You don’t understand what there is to be embarrassed about.

“Yeah, it’s no big deal. Should I meet you in the classroom after school or just next to your car?”

A nervous grin—that’s an expression you’ve never seen before. “My car is fine.”

You nod. “Sure. See ya later, dude.”

You hear him say, “Thanks,” before slamming the door and give him a thumbs up as you walk away. As always, he waits at the curb until he knows you’re safely inside. You don’t even notice that you sit right down to do your homework instead of turning on your Xbox.

 

His apartment is small, two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a connected living room and kitchen. It’s clean, which you could’ve expected, and there is an awful lot of liquor on top of the fridge, which you didn’t. You give him a questioning look that he doesn’t notice, and it’s not until his roommate—a beautiful blonde with a penchant for purple—walks in with a glass of pinot noir at 2:30 in the afternoon and a slurred greeting that you realize the alcohol probably doesn’t all belong to him.

You sit on their couch and wait for him to finish whatever business he had to take care of immediately, eyeing his roommate from behind your shades. She’s attractive, heels on in the house, a tight-fitting dress and a long scarf. She winks at you from where she stands in the kitchen before moving into her own room. Two months ago and you would’ve been falling over yourself to get her to let you fuck her. You’re confused when the urge doesn’t cross you at all.

Soon enough you start on the homework, and there’s silence for a while as you both work on your own projects. You’re finding it difficult to focus.

“So, you dating the broad with the alcoholic tendencies?” you hear yourself ask. He laughs a little, and it calms nerves you didn’t even realize had tensed.

“No. We did once in high school, but that ended pretty quickly, and we’ve been very good friends ever since.”

You train your gaze harder on your textbook. “Are you dating at all?”

There’s a long stretch of silence that you don’t understand. Finally he says, “No, I can’t really date right now. Are you having difficulty with that problem? It’s one of the harder ones…”

You let him change the subject, as awkward a transition as it is. To be honest, you aren’t sure why you were asking him those things in the first place.

 

By the following week, you’ve been working so hard on algebra that you’re finally caught up to where the class is, and when you listen to him teach, you find you’re comprehending everything he says.

“So, let’s take this function, the quantity two _m_ over three _m_ plus three, minus the quantity _m_ plus two over six _m_ plus six, all of that equal to the quantity _m_ minus six over eight _m_ plus eight, that quantity plus five twelfths. Okay? Who’s got this one?”

Most of the students copy the equation down from the whiteboard, some tentatively raising their hands. He’s about to call on someone when your hand slowly inches up. His eyes are drawn to you immediately. “Bro?”

A few students glance back at you, and you know that they’re all surprised. You’ve never contributed anything to class discussion before. You’re a little surprised yourself. Oddly enough, he doesn’t look surprised at all.

“It’s zero, right?” you say, careful to keep from sounding unsure of yourself. His smile in response is so warm and it dawns on you that you know him better than any of these students here. _He_ knows _you_ better than anyone in your entire life ever has.

How are you supposed to move on from that revelation? He says, “Good job,” and you know he’s saying it just to you, like it’s private, a secret between the two of you, and then he continues teaching as if the most groundbreaking discovery hadn’t just been made. The dorky guy with stupid fedora-flattened hair who loves algebra and baking, who’s standing at the front of your classroom grinning out at all of his students, cares about you more than any person ever has. And with a sick sense of dread, you realize that you’ve never cared about anyone until now.

Your father was gone before you were born. Your mother abandoned you soon after. A string of relatives decidedly lost contact. You went into the system, a child of the state. Finally you were adopted, and like a fool you believed that it would be the answer to everything, that your new father would give to you what your own family couldn’t. But he beat you down, called you a waste of space, useless, stupid. All you ever knew was to shut yourself off from the world, show nothing because then no one can take it from you, and you didn’t think you had space inside you to feel pain that no one ever tried to demonstrate that you had it wrong, that the world isn’t that bad. That there are people out there who don’t want to hurt you.

Until him. Since the day you met him he has been doing everything to prove to you that it’s possible for you to care, and you didn’t understand for the longest time because whatever this feeling is, it’s always been beyond your emotional range.

Fears and insecurities that you’d never been consciously aware of suddenly seem crystal clear to you. Your foster father’s right, isn’t he? You’re useless. You’ve wasted everything that’s ever been of value to you. You’re broken, the rib is healed but _you_ are still broken, and even if he continues to try for you, you’ll eventually suck his vast reserve of happiness dry, he’ll realize that you are a lost cause, he’ll give up. He’s only here for another two months anyways, and once he’s finished teaching he’ll graduate and leave you.

You stand abruptly, and your classmates all look at you, but they don’t matter. When you look up he’s staring straight into your eyes. Shades be fucking damned, he was staring into your eyes the entire time, looked and saw _you_ , not the person you pretend to be, not the person that everyone else sees. And when he speaks, it’s not what any other teacher would say ( _Bro sit down or get out of my class_ ), because he says, “Broderick,” so softly, and you can’t stand the way your heart races as he calls your name. You abscond.

Moments later and you are rushing out of the main doors, not knowing where you’re going but knowing you need to go, until you feel a hand tug on your arm and spin you around. For the first time since you met him, he looks confused. He doesn’t let go of your arm. You could pull away if you wanted to. You don’t know if you want to.

“Broderick, please don’t leave,” he manages to say, voice catching.

“Why shouldn’t I? You’re just gonna do the same to me,” you retort, and fuck all you can even hear how upset you are in your tone. You must be losing your mind.

His other hand moves, and it looks like he’s battling with himself over what to do, and finally he holds your head in his hand, fingers cupping around the back of your head and thumb brushing against your ear. “Why would I leave you?” he asks quietly, eyes searching your own. You want to cry. But you don’t. You _can’t_.

“You’re too good for me,” you finally say, voice wavering so much that you want to punch yourself for showing this much weakness. “I don’t deserve you. You’re fucking perfect and you’re going to graduate soon and have a great life and forget I even existed and you’ll be better off for it.”

He moves your head a little to get you to look at him. You hadn’t realized you’d averted your eyes. “I’m not going to do that.” He sounds so serious. Your heart feels like it’s going to explode. So you scoff as tearfully as you can.

“Don’t be so fucking naïve—”

Then his lips are pressed to yours, and you are effectively stunned into silence.

It doesn’t last nearly long enough, because he pulls away only after a few seconds and glances around nervously. You remember that he’s a teacher. Whatever is happening between you two right now, it probably isn’t legal. But he looks into your eyes again, and despite the anxiety in his own, he doesn’t look away.

“I’m not going to do that,” he repeats, and quickly kisses your forehead. “I’m not. Okay?”

The feeling that had been clawing at your insides is subdued, and after several moments you sigh and nod. He smiles at you, relieved, and he’s close enough that you can feel his whisper of, “I’m so proud of you, Broderick,” on your lips.

The grating feeling is now completely gone, replaced with something warm and foreign. You think that maybe someday, you can start to feel like you’re worthy of his pride.

You think that as long as he’s with you, maybe someday you’ll even have the capacity to be proud of yourself.


End file.
